October 28, 2013

Thank God for SCIENCE!1!

The head gasket on the Cressida blew.
Now, changing a head gasket has the potential to be upwards of 1500 dollars and on a car as old as mine it can sometimes be impossible. To express my thoughts on the matter would be non-conducive to both stoicism and Arete..so I'll let this imaginary girl do it.

Fortunately, thanks to SCIENCE there now exists Head Gasket Sealant. It doesn't always work...but this time it did.
Yay!
Of course the oil and coolant had to be flushed, the injectors and spark plugs had to be cleaned and an unrelated bulb needed to be changed but it still was under 300 dollars.

That sucks...but it's not a catastrophic suckasge.

In other news: I work for UPS...not one of the Obamacare contractors...so I'm considering myself pretty lucky at the moment.

As for the Obamacare site contractors, after considering the boatload of crap they were handed in terms of requirements, and the doubtless politicised awarding of the work to 55 separate contractors, I'm impressed that they managed to deliver anything at all. And right now, by no fault of their own, the guys in the trenches are likely going through hell.

I've seen plenty of contractors screw the pooch on large projects, but this pooch came pre-screwed at the highest level.

3
I had a head gasket leak on Neon, which was basically guaranteed on the 1G with 2.0L (both SOHC and DOHC) and about 46k miles. The dealership only took $866 to replace it. I heard that since it was so common on Neons back then, they learned how to pop the head off without diconnecting much of anything, just having the timing belt off the cam. Then, remove the gasket, and slide in the replacement, bolt the head back on and push the timing belt's loop into position, done! Took them some 3 hours or so. The replacement gasket stayed in place for another 120k miles before I sold the car for $850.

4
@PIXY
My friend BOB! was talking about this.Trying to get a website that will act as a phishing operation for 11 different departments each with their own systems that date back to the 70s and are written in at least 11 personalized different obsolete languages like Fortran or sometsuch and are designed to NOT share data is a tall order...getting them to do it so that there's a back and forth of data between all 11 outfits and the victim in real time is nigh impossible. Doing it in the amount of time specified removes the nigh.

These people were set up to fail and are now the scapegoats for the arrogance of others. I pity them.